


let me in, share your love, that will be a start

by inconocible



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant?, F/M, Missing Scene, Slight Mention of Blood, but he also cares a lot about jyn even though he's only known her for like two days, cassian cares a lot about privilege, discussions of privilege, hurt/comfort if you squint, i haven't read the novelization but i've seen excerpts and it gave me a lot of feelings, i really needed to see this okay, nothing graphic, passing mention of canon-compliant character death, possible head injury, right after eadu, self indulgent fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 14:36:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9276299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inconocible/pseuds/inconocible
Summary: She is selfish and privileged and fucking up his mission and he wants to be mad at her, but also she is shivering and maybe concussed and maybe in shock and definitely very much alone, is why.





	

**Author's Note:**

> baby let this be a start. ([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxRhY-1x_hA))

Water drips into his eyes. “Anyone else?” he exclaims. Nobody says anything, though both Baze and Chirrut fix him with suspicious expressions.

He storms up the stairs, not knowing exactly where he’s going, just – away. The ladder spits him out into an empty crew cabin, a row of bunks with no personality, somewhere for Imperial soldiers to catch a quick in-flight nap.

He ruffles a frustrated hand through his wet hair, shaking water out of it. He thinks for the millionth time that he should have left Jyn back on Yavin 4. He closes his eyes, bows his chin to his chest, pinches the bridge of his nose, and forces himself to count slowly to 100, then back down to zero. He breathes in, and then out, a deep sigh. He is good at his job, he tells himself. He does terrible things but they are done in the name of the Rebellion, and he is good at doing them. It is Jyn, selfish, naïve, Jyn, who has fucked with things. It is Jyn who has drawn him in and thrown him off at the same time. He is a professional, though, and he is good at his job, and this is something he can handle.

He clenches his hands and his jaw, and consciously relaxes them, blowing out a forceful breath of air.

“Okay,” he says to himself.

He climbs back down the stairs, and the first thing he sees is Jyn, sitting on the crew bench seat, dripping water onto the floor of the cargo hold, bent over at the waist with her elbows braced on her knees and her head in her hands. Cassian looks around the room: Chirrut is seated on the floor on the opposite side of the hold, leaning his head against Baze’s knees, and Baze has found a dry cloth somewhere and is methodically drying both his and Chirrut’s weapons. Cassian clears his throat awkwardly.

“I apologize for my behavior,” he says. He’s mad at Jyn, sure, she’s fucked with everything Cassian has tried to do since leaving Yavin 4, and she’s behaved like a spoiled, centered, abandoned, hurt, parentless child who believes she is the center of the galaxy, and he’s mad at her. Sure. But still, “I shouldn’t have raised my voice like that,” he offers to the room.

Jyn doesn’t move; Baze looks up with a raised eyebrow. It is Chirrut who extends a dismissive hand and says, with an air of knowing, “Don’t be troubled, Captain. We all carry our own prison chains with us, and occasionally they hurt others. It is to be expected in this life.”

Cassian shrugs and glances at him, meeting Baze’s steady, skeptical gaze over Chirrut’s head. “Ah, I don’t know about all that. Sometimes things just, remind you of other things, you know. I, I don’t know.” He sighs. “It doesn’t matter.” He glances at Jyn, still hiding her face, still dripping water from the ends of her hair and edges of her jacket. Everything about her body language screams misery. He reminds himself that she is the reason this mission has gone so wrong. He’s sure of it.

“Anyway, I’m sorry for losing my head.” He stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and turns toward Jyn, who is still ignoring him. “I’m gonna go see what our ETA is. Once we get out of Imperial space we gotta transmit out the request to debrief immediately, and we need to figure out what we’re gonna say to convince them to act on this now that we don’t have your father to convince them.” Jyn’s shoulders shift, but otherwise she doesn’t respond. Cassian cocks his head to the side. Jyn, she’s gotta move with him on this, she’s gotta do this, he’s gotta make her do this, even if he is still kind of pissed at her. She’s the only one who actually saw the message on Jedha, who actually spoke to Galen on Eadu. As much as he wants to hate it, it has to be her.

“Jyn,” he says, letting his tone harden, but she doesn’t look up at him. “I’m giving you five minutes while I talk to Bodhi and Kaytoo, then we gotta get our shit together.” He pauses a moment, waiting for any kind of acknowledgement. Nothing. He clenches his hands into fists inside his pockets, and relaxes them, and tries not to let himself get more pissed off.

He crosses the hold and drops to one knee in front of her, hesitating a moment before taking her wrist, tugging just a bit, trying to get her to remove a hand from her face. She doesn’t.

“Jyn?” he says again, his voice dropping to a gritty near-whisper, his jaw clenched. He gets in her space, his lips almost brushing her forehead, and he speaks slowly and clearly and with as much control over his frustration as he can muster, trying to punch through her mental fog. “Listen to me right now. I’m calling this in priority one. We’re not gonna write a report, we don’t have time for that, we gotta debrief them immediately and in person if we want them to act on this. I need you to work with me. A lot has happened. Before we get there, we need to go over the information we have gathered today so we can make a strong presentation to Mon Mothma and hopefully the council. Do you understand this?”

She nods, but doesn’t say anything. He tightens his grip on her wrist, not quite hard enough to bruise, tugging her hand from her face, reaching for her chin with his other hand, and she sighs softly and gives in, letting him tip her face up, her chin resting on his index finger. She raises her head but won’t meet his eyes, looks down at her knees instead, and there is blood drying over her left eyebrow, and that side of her face is starting to swell, and Cassian wonders distantly if she has a concussion, and her jaw is clenched possibly even tighter than his is, and she presses her lips together into a scowl.

Cassian depresses the pad of his thumb against the point of her chin. “Look at me and tell me you understand,” he grits out.

When Jyn speaks, she sounds young, and soft, and far away. “I understand,” she breathes, finally lifting her gaze to his. He is fixated by what he sees there, her eyes devoid of the girlish tears he’d half-expected, fatally blank instead, and part of him wants nothing more than to look away, but some other part of him is reeled in. He’s still mad at her and she’s still ruining the success of this mission, he reminds himself, but he’s transfixed.

They just look at one another for a long moment, his grip on her wrist and chin relaxing as he stares. “Are you hurt?” he finally asks, and she shrugs one shoulder in a non-answer.

He lets go of her wrist and chin, and before he can ask himself what the fuck he’s doing, he’s reaching for her again. In one slow, careful motion, he licks the pad of his right thumb, and he cups her right cheek in his left hand, holding her still, and he swipes away the not-quite clotted blood from her left eyebrow with his spit-damp thumb, and he runs a gentle, flat palm over her left ear and her wet hair, telling himself that he’s just making sure she doesn’t have any obvious head injuries, but he swears she leans into his touch, and he lingers longer than he ought to, her head cradled in his hands. Eventually, he lets her go, and he straightens up, takes one step backwards, clears his throat. “Five minutes,” he says, and he turns for the cockpit, shocked at himself.

-

When he comes back, she is sitting up straight with her head tilted back against the wall of the shuttle, a scowl on her face. Baze and Chirrut haven’t moved. Jyn’s arms are crossed tightly across her chest, and her legs are crossed one knee over the other. She looks cold, Cassian thinks.

“Okay,” Cassian says, “Bodhi says it’s gonna be about a half hour, and Kaytoo’s gonna send the message as soon as we get out of Imperial space. I’m just hoping that Mon Mothma’s got a space in her schedule, but, for a priority one, she’s supposed to make space.”

Jyn nods and makes a noncommittal noise of understanding, or agreement, or something, in her throat.

Cassian knows they need to start strategizing, and quickly, and he’s also still thinking maybe Jyn has a concussion, but some base part of him in the back of his brain is still pissed off at her, and is also pissed off at himself, and he can’t stop what his mouth says, which is: “Hey, Jyn, look.” He sighs. “I apologize for being harsh with you, earlier. I shouldn’t have raised my voice at you.”

“It was nothing,” Jyn answers curtly, and he thinks she sounds a bit more like herself than she did five minutes ago, though a weary, wrung-out version of herself, and he thinks also that she’s being short with him, and his temper flares.

“No,” Cassian counters, gesturing with his hands, “no, look, I shouldn’t have raised my voice, but it wasn’t nothing, you gotta understand this. We’ve all lost people, and I’m not saying that the Rebellion discourages memorializing the dead or, or processing loss. That’s not it at all. The thing is, though, that it seems to me you have somehow moved through your life so far thinking you have the privilege of being outside this fight. Tough shit. You truly choose to be a member of this rebellion? I promise you, you will have people in your corner, you will get help working through the shit so you can keep fighting for hope. But it’s a _collective_ hope, Jyn, it’s not for you and me personally, or even for our families, but for someday our children, or their children, the entire galaxy.” He gestures with his hands, expanding them in front of him, around him, taking a couple pacing steps back and forth. “I mean, shit, Jyn, you, you can’t go around being like, like,” and he takes a breath, he’s talking too fast, shit, he tries to slow himself down. “You can’t go around acting like you’ve got the privilege of only caring when you want to care. You can’t just go around, aw, everything is terrible, poor me. You have to _do_ something. Do you understand? You’re either with us all the way, or you’re not with us at all. I mean it, you don’t get to choose.” He huffs out a breath and tries to reign his temper in.

“Well said,” Chirrut interjects.

Cassian’s attention never waivers from Jyn. He waits, fixing her with the full weight of his frustration. Slowly, over the course of about two full minutes, her jaw relaxes. Her expression shifts to something he can’t quite name, something with fewer hard lines that isn’t quite sadness.

“I’m sorry,” she finally says, meeting his eyes. “I – I didn’t realize.”

“I _know_ you didn’t,” he says. “That’s why I’m telling you now. And that’s why I yelled at you earlier. Which I shouldn’t have done. But you need to understand.”

She looks away, rubbing her hands over her elbows, tightening her crossed arms over her chest. “I apologize,” she says. “I was wrong. And – you had no reason to apologize. Earlier.”

“Then let’s consider it even, and get to work,” he says. “Are you with me?”

The idea of a smile ghosts over her face, quirks the muscles on the uninjured side briefly before it passes. “All the way,” she says quietly, and a shiver seems to cascade down her whole body, her shoulders shaking with it.

He considers her. “Okay,” he says, inhaling and exhaling a thoughtful breath, propping his hands on his hips, taking a few pacing steps back and forth in front of her. “Okay. We gotta go over how we’re gonna present our mission report. Normally I hole up in my room and refuse to speak to anyone for like six hours after a mission to take some time to write my report concisely and carefully. I hate doing verbal debriefs, I always feel like I’m gonna leave something out, but I think the faster we push this intel through, the better chance we have of the council convening to take action on it.”

He glances at her. She’s not answering, letting him ramble, but she watches him and rubs her hands back and forth over her elbows and upper arms. He pauses in his pacing. “Are you sure you’re not injured? Maybe you hit your head when the explosion –”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, cutting him off, and he ought to be annoyed with how she’s still being short with him, but a shiver visibly rolls over her body, and she grimaces, and a dart of worry shoots through him. He looks more carefully and realizes a bruise is already starting to come to the surface above her left eye. He’s trying to think about the mission report but now he’s distracted, starts mentally going over the symptoms of concussions and shock. She shivers again.

Cassian sits down next to her, carefully leaving two inches of space between his body and Jyn’s. He glances at her sidelong, laying his right arm over the back of the bench, pointedly not touching her. An invitation. He doesn’t want to ask himself why, but he knows. She is selfish and privileged and fucking up his mission and he wants to be mad at her, but also she is shivering and maybe concussed and maybe in shock and definitely very much alone, is why. The blank, fatal look in her expression five minutes ago, is why. “Are you cold?” he asks quietly.

She looks at him for a long, uncertain moment, then swallows, and nods. “Yeah,” she says, and she scoots over, closing the two inches between them, pressing herself against him: foot, thigh, hipbone, ribs. He lays his right arm around her shoulders and she tucks her left shoulder into his body, shivering into his touch, carefully resting the left side of her head against the place where his collarbone meets his shoulder. She closes her eyes, and he feels her breathe out, long and with her whole body.

Something seizes up inside Cassian’s ribcage, and it feels like the thing that put a bad taste in his mouth and clouded his vision and kept him from shooting Galen Erso on Eadu, and it feels like the thing that caught his breath when Jyn threw him to the ground during their first firefight on Jedha, and it feels like hope maybe, or possibly like despair, he can’t tell. He swallows hard, his throat suddenly constricted by this thing, trying to tamp it back down inside himself before it chokes him.

“Hey, Jyn, don’t fall asleep,” he whispers, tightening his grip on her right shoulder, rubbing idle circles with his thumb against the rough fabric of her jacket. “We need to – and also if you do actually have a concussion – okay? Jyn?”

“Okay,” Jyn says, and she sounds weary still, but determined maybe, or some simulation of relaxed, or at least no longer curt. She reaches up, touches his hand at her shoulder, slides her fingers under his, squeezes, lets go. “Let’s do this.”


End file.
